One time, at Mars camp

The Mars nuts of the Mars Society cobbled together $300,000 to build the habitation
capsule as a means of reproducing likely conditions on the red planet.

PHOTO BY SANJIV BHATTACHARYA

Here’s a little-known fact about life on
Mars: It smells. And not of jasmine and lavender, either. It smells
of socks and urine and onions and armpits.

I know this because today is my last day of a
two-week stay on the closest approximation to a Martian habitat
that exists on Earth — the Mars Desert Research Station, in
the vast red and rocky wilderness of southern Utah. About four
hours south of Salt Lake City, near the flyspeck town of
Hanksville, an unmarked track leads into an extraordinary desert,
an ocean bed roughly 85 million years dry. Drive another 10
lurching minutes through the dunes and you’ll find us in a
cute white thimble of a place, perched improbably upright in the
barren landscape.

For three years now, a stream of scientists
and sundry nerds (NASA alumni among them) has traveled here from
all over the world to live under Mars conditions in teams of six for two weeks at a time. The
idea is to test-run the practicalities of the Martian lifestyle, both
physical and psychological. We want to discover what work can actually
be done in spacesuits. What tools do you need? How do crew members cope
with confinement? That sort of thing. So to that end, I and five others
have been playing a dedicated game of astronauts — we wear
spacesuits when we go outside, we ration water (one shower per week),
we rove about on Mars-style buggies and take our orders each morning
from Mission Control in Colorado.

We also break for cigarettes now and again,
without our spacesuits, which would be unthinkable on Mars —
you’d explode, suffocate, and freeze to death all at once.
Besides, your cigarette wouldn’t light. And on Mars you
couldn’t just pop to the shops if you ran out of cheese. But
we did, once. In our spacesuits and everything. You should have
seen the face of the cashier when we strolled in, saying,
“Check. Cheddar located on aisle five. Sliced or block, over?” She
wasn’t amused. Every two weeks a fresh batch of giggling nerds
come bounding through her shop, waving and grinning inside their
helmets, and this morning she was in no mood. She just dumped our
change on the counter.

“Receipt’s in the bag,” she
said.

There is a serious side to all this, though.
Since the MDRS was built in February 2002, the challenge of
captivity and exploring a red wilderness in spacesuits has already
yielded all kinds of pointers for future Mars missions. They range
from the grand, such as “Exploration is physical, so we must
use artificial gravity in the spaceship on the way over”
(zero gravity tends to waste the muscles), to the relatively
mundane, such as “Bring a breadmaker — the smell is
good for morale.” To the last point, however, I would add
that we’ve baked a fresh loaf every day and it hasn’t
been nearly enough to combat the kind of festering space funk
I’m talking about. You can’t just open the window — the windows don’t open on Mars
— and last night we ate three-bean chili, so you do the math.
Even by recycling our kitchen and sink water to flush with, the
rationing is strict — “If it’s brown, flush it down;
if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” And soiled wipings go in
the trash because
they tend to clog up the U-bend. Multiply this effect by six people
over two weeks, and you’re getting the picture. Future
Marsonauts, take heed — no matter how cosmic your voyage or how
giant your leaps, they will be accompanied by the whiff of stale
flatulence.

That said, the hab (habitation capsule) is a
tribute to the ingenuity and dedication of Mars nuts. The domed
two-story cylinder on landing stilts, built to house six — in
a space 27 feet across — was constructed by the Mars Society
over one bitterly cold Christmas holiday for the bargain sum of
$300,000, cobbled from sponsors and membership dues. Its design is
such that it might feasibly be a component of the most realistic
humans-on-Mars proposal in recent years — a scheme called
Mars Direct, which resuscitated the Mars program back when George
H.W. Bush was president. In those days, the plan for human beings
on Mars involved a lengthy stopover at a giant space station and
cost so much ($450 billion) that it threatened to sink the very
notion. So a band of believers, sensing a crisis, swiftly proposed
that a leaner, cheaper, six-man mission fly there directly in seven
months.

Once there, the crew would harness
19th-century chemistry to convert Mars’ atmosphere into
rocket propellant — which would both refuel the rocket for
the return leg and provide energy for the generators. The crew
would then spend two whole years investigating the red planet
before coming home.

The details of Mars Direct are best
laid out in the 1996 book The Case for
Mars by Mars Society founder
Robert Zubrin, a sometime rocket scientist turned full-time author
and lobbyist. He reckons that we could have humans on Mars by 2020,
and MDRS is one of two research laboratories he has built in
anticipation. The other is near Resolute Bay, in the Canadian
Arctic, which is exactly as cold as it sounds, so Zubrin suggests
that I join an MDRS crew instead. This is all his idea. He says,
“We’ve never had a journalist actually join a crew
before. Just one question: Are you mechanically minded at all?
Because in space you need people who can fix things.” I
confess that I can barely fix dinner without a manual, so he
assigns me the task of keeping a daily journal. “All great
explorers keep a journal,” he says. “That’s an
important job, too.”

It’s nice that he says
“important” but I’m not kidding myself here. When
the generator blows up and we lose our satellite signal, no one
yells, “Quick, get the journalist!”, just as
you’ll never hear the line “Can anyone on this plane
write a headline with a pun?” (How about “Boeing,
Going, Gone”?)

Luckily, my fellow crew members are no
slouches. These are dedicated Mars fans and no fools. Take Georgi,
for instance, a precociously bright Bulgarian architect from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose thesis A Permanent Settlement on Mars became the central project of our mission. At 27,
Georgi has amassed two master’s degrees. He’s also a
big fan of Daft Punk and brandy. His best friend on the trip is
Sandy, 23, a Canadian with a master’s in geology who is both
the only woman and the fastest buggy driver. By the end, Georgi and
Sandy are giving each other backrubs, which makes a few of the
older crew members a little nervous.

Not Richard, though. This 60-year-old
agronomist may be the most senior, but ever since his flower-power
days in San Francisco he has made a lifelong study of psychoactive
plants. “I’m a connoisseur of highs,” he tells me
before presenting me with a fossil. “You want cosmic? This is
a billion years old!”

The most indispensable member of the team,
however, is James, 35, a soft-spoken computer scientist from Texas.
Quietly and without fuss he has mended our air packs, radios, the
generator, the plumbing, and the heating, and he has kept our
Internet connection alive through the dust storms. For a man who
lives with eight cats and chain-smokes Marlboro 100s, he’s as
close to astronaut material as you’ll find in crew 22. By
rights, he should have been commander, but instead we are saddled
with John, 52, the least popular man on the planet — but more
about him later.

First, the spacesuits. Every day we have to
clean and climb into these heavy canvas jumpsuits based loosely on
the design of the Apollo lunar outfit. They’re not quite the
real thing, all hermetic, pressurized, and fitted with penis
catheters, but they’re close enough. They have the desired
effect of rendering you as limber as the Tin Man and as dexterous
as a bear with mittens. Getting dressed is a proper rigmarole, not
to be attempted alone. First you climb in, give yourself a wedgie,
and pirouette as a crewmate wraps your waist with duct tape as an
ad hoc belt. The earpieces have a habit of falling out, so more
duct tape there, and remember to wipe the inside of your helmet
with dish soap to prevent misting. Real astronauts use dish soap,
too, but not too much — otherwise the helmet fills with gunk
and bubbles.

The buggies are the best part of living on
Mars — ask anyone. My fondest memories will involve tearing
through the desert with Georgi and Sandy, armed only with a
topographic map, a digital camera, and a full tank of gas. For
hours we roar toward a magnificent Martian horizon, diminishing
brilliantly into specks. After a few miles we lose radio contact
with the hab, so it’s just us and the landscape, getting
lost, getting stuck in crevices, tipping over now and again. Having
a blast, in other words.

Like proper explorers, we plot our route as we
go, flagging buttes, canyons, and passes with homemade signposts
marked “Copernicus,” “Kepler,” and
“Sagan.” It seems odd that the first 21 crews
didn’t take this basic step to make their brave new world
navigable, but having driven back to the hab past our handiwork, I
understand why Mission Support was slow to sanction the project
— they wanted to preserve the virginity of fake Mars so that
future crews might also taste the illusion that they are the first
here.

The longer we’ve stayed, the
more MDRS has felt like a Mars-themed holiday camp. With free
lodging and food, all-terrain buggies, and a desert on our
doorstep, Club Mars allows enthusiasts to play at being space
explorers while actually contributing, in a small way, to the dream
of human beings on Mars. No phones ring here; there is no TV. Our
earthly frettings about rent and bills recede with every passing
day. And in the evenings, we have these spirited debates with
fellow Mars fans about things such as space tourism and the X
Prize. Usually John and Georgi go head to head over dinner,
particularly once the beer comes out — the Utah-brewed
Polygamy Porter (slogan: “Why just have one?”). But it
isn’t all science talk. Last night, for example, we discussed
Richard’s collection of Japanese rock sculpture over
piping-hot bowls of chili. Talk about artsy-fartsy.

With this settling in, however, our freshman
zeal for the rules of sim has waned somewhat. It has fallen to
John, as commander, to set our sim parameters — most
important, how long we’ll take in the airlock — and
luckily he isn’t much of a stickler. He’s opted for
five minutes each way. Previous commanders have insisted that crews
spend a punishing 40 minutes in the airlock before leaving or
entering the hab because that’s how long it would take on
Mars, so we’ve gotten off lightly, no question. But because
we’re only on “Mars” and all this
“depressurizing” in the “airlock” is just a
just a test of patience in the end, even that paltry five minutes
seems to last forever. Until day six, at any rate, when the edifice
of sim first begins to crumble.

It is a blazing-hot day, and Mission Control
has instructed us to start building Georgi’s project, so we
spend most of the day tramping around in the sun, lifting rocks
from point A to point B and mixing cement. I can’t see NASA
sending its finest recruits 400 million miles to do this kind of
gruntwork, to be honest, but, still, orders are orders. By the time
John calls it a day, we are beat and eager to put the kettle on.

So rather than “depressurize” in
two groups of three, we opt to squeeze in all at once. It’s a
squash, but we make it — six pretend astronauts, all jammed,
immobile, as if we’re on the Tokyo metro. All I can hear is
my airpack, pumping a cool breeze into my ears. Those lyrics come
to mind: “Here I am, sitting in a tin can. Far across the
world.” Then Georgi breaks the calm. He digs me in the ribs
with his elbow, giggling — this is a man with two
master’s degrees. So I threaten to switch off his air pack,
but Sandy comes to his defense by booting me in the shins, except
that she accidentally kicks James, who then steals her geological
hammer. Like chaos theory this Little Lock of Calm descends into a
scrum until — “Whoa!” The hab door has swung
open. Barely a minute has passed. “Uh-oh.”

We shoot looks at each other and then at John,
who looks noticeably annoyed. “Oh well,” he huffs.
“No point closing the door now that we’ve all got the
bends.”

Come report time, there is much that I
can’t include. It would be treacherous to inform Mission
Control how sim is falling apart, and yet clearly the writing is on
the wall. Before long, we are all sneaking out without spacesuits.
James and I hit the whisky at night and go out to smoke cigarettes.
Georgi goes on morning walks. Richard wanders off alone to search
for fossils. And through it all, John’s authority seems only
to decline. Were this a game of Martian Survivor, everyone but
Richard would vote John off the planet first.

In hindsight, John’s approach is all
wrong. He introduces himself on day one with his trumpet fixed
firmly to his lips. “I’ve been a biologist, a
geologist, a physicist, a geophysicist, a geochemist — ooh,
let’s see — and I’ve worked closely with rocket
scientists,” he says. “And that’s what you want
in space — someone who has experience in a broad range of
disciplines.” You also want a commander without esteem
issues. It isn’t long before his know-it-all front starts
showing cracks. It transpires that he wasn’t aware that
America had an election last year and that he has never heard of
Austin Powers. Then one day he lets rip a mighty fart and carries
on as though nothing has happened. Not even Roald Amundsen could
have recovered from that one.

I’m glad this is the last day. Two weeks
is quite long enough in these cramped quarters, without privacy,
showers, or, for that matter, silence. I could write a laundry list
of suggestions for the hab designers — some nooks or alcoves
would be nice, and better-lit bedrooms, and an extra floor, and so
on. But the real challenge for a future manned mission to Mars is
not in the architecture or in the design of an appropriate rocket
but in the “manned” part. Ultimately Mars is other
people, and therein lies the trouble.

I don’t mean John particularly —
he is so unpopular that he has been a cohesive force, if anything
— and for the rest of us, thrown together like a reality
show, we’ve gotten along remarkably well, considering. But
confinement, like marriage, has a terrible way of telescoping your
relationships and amplifying what begins as a harmless quirk into
an excruciatingly annoying character flaw. You’d need the
patience of Job to endure Georgi’s singing for the long haul,
not to mention Richard’s lectures about how pouring flaxseed
oil on your cereal can improve your brainpower. And I say this
after two weeks in Utah. A real Mars mission would last more than
three years.

I have to go. There’s a stink wafting up
from downstairs, where I can hear John stamping about calling for a
mop. Something about a clog in the U-bend . . .